What You Should You Do in The Case of an Electrical Emergency
You can never be too careful when it comes to electricity and the danger it poses if not used or installed correctly, taking the right safeguards and following established procedures can usually reduce the danger, but sometimes the unexpected happens. When faced with an electrical emergency either at home or at work, it’s important to know what to do and what not to do. Hopefully this article should emphasize the importance of occupational health and safety as well as provide you with the steps you should take.
What you should do in the case of an electrical emergency
- If there is an electrical power outage
You should call for help as soon as possible, as you might not know what has caused the outage and will need to help of professional electricians. You should take a look at these guys, they come highly recommended https://albaelec.com.au/, who offer an emergency call out service 24 hours a day. It’s always better to be prepared than not to know who to contact and, when something like an emergency takes place, our brains don’t always operate as they should do.
- If somebody is being electrocuted, DO NOT touch them
To help a co-worker who has suffered an electric shock it, touching them to see if they are ok is likely to be your initial reaction. But first, let’s take a step back and consider, the human body is a good conductor of electricity, which means that if you come into contact with your co-workers, the charge that just travelled through them might readily move into you. As you will already know, electricity has the potential to kill or seriously injure people, thus making sure nobody touches your co-worker directly should be your number one priority, if you can.
Sometimes, electrical currents can cause people to appear stuck because the victim’s muscles contract as a result of the extremely high voltage and, if they are holding onto an electrical cable or similar, they probably won’t be able to let go, you may be tempted to try and release them but it is strongly advised that you do not, instead, call the emergency services as soon as possible.
- Turn off the power
Turn off the power if it is safe to do so without endangering yourself; this makes the emergency scene considerably safer to move around when the ambulance arrives and prevents further damage. If you can’t safely switch off the power, try to detach the victim from the power source with a dry, non-conductive object like a wooden broomstick or there might be something similar provided if you have an electric shock rescue kit.
- You could try and administer first aid
Only if it is safe to do so and, the victim is not connected to any kind of electrical current you could attempt CPR if they are out cold or, if they are awake and have injuries you could treat their burns and apply bandages. If you have a trained first aider on hand, that would be even better.
The sooner you call in the experts like Reyff Electric the better, as an electrical emergency can be extremely dangerous.
